Advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking and telecommunication technologies have led to the development and wide spread adoption of networked computing devices and mobile communication devices. As a result, email, instant messaging, and wireless telephone calls have all become important vehicles of communication for a large segment of the population, if not the preferred forms of communication for these users.
It is known that for many users, their email and instant messaging communications (also referred to as textual or non-verbal communications) often involve the use of emoticons, such as the “smiling face” or the “sad face”. However, few email or instant messaging applications offer any assistance to a user to enter and use emoticons in their communications. Some instant messaging applications offer the minimal assistance of converting or replacing a handful of widely used emoticon forming sequences of characters to corresponding graphical symbols. For example, when the characters “:” (colon), “=” (equal sign) and “)” (right parenthesis) are successfully entered, some instant messaging applications automatically replace the entered characters with the graphical symbol “ ”.
These prior art facilities suffer from a number of disadvantages. First, typically only a handful of these emoticon forming character sequences are supported. Thus, virtually no assistance is provided to a user who chooses to be creative, and uses an unconventional sequence of characters to form an emoticon, e.g. the character sequence of “:”, “#” and “0” for a flabbergasted or astounded expression. Further, regardless of whether the character sequence is conventional or unconventional, a user typically has to enter the emoticon forming characters one at a time. This disadvantage is amplified in situations where the user is conducting the textual or non-verbal communication using a communication device having limited input facilities, such as wireless mobile phones.
Accordingly, facilities that are more user friendly in assisting a user to employ emoticons in their communications, especially on communication devices with limited input facilities, such as wireless mobile phones, are desired.